Online Reporter
The new extended school syllabuses that combine and integrate theory with practical applications reach the next stage this year, with the end-of-year examinations for Grade 7, O level and A level set by ZIMSEC now incorporating the changes.
Whenever syllabuses change, there is always a gap between the new syllabus being taught and the examinations; normally a class studies the new syllabus for two years before being examined.
This ensures that what has been laid down has been taught, otherwise it would be most unfair to prepare children for an examination that does not test what they have learnt.
The Heritage curriculum generally adds to what children were already being taught.
Theory is not abandoned, but children are taught to connect theory and integrate it into practice, which is a radical change.
This first of all makes the required background knowledge far easier to understand. Simply learning a pile of facts can be difficult, especially when there is nothing to relate those facts to personal experience, and little indication of how that theory is applied.
In the Heritage curriculum, the relationships are present from the start, and many children will discover that they need additional facts to make their practical applications and innovations work.
In other words, theory supports practice, and those who are innovating or doing are keen to acquire the facts, and then understand them.
When you are actually doing something — as happens throughout life — you frequently find you need to know more and either consult suitable reference works or, in these 21st century days, search the internet to find the extra information you require.
This ensures that new information is relevant from the outset, and if there are complications in understanding it at first, then spending more time mastering the facts makes sense.
One major problem with knowledge-based curriculums is the rapidly changing pool of knowledge.
As you grow older, you often find that what you learnt in the past has been overtaken, and sometimes is now completely wrong.
If you have been immersed in a learning environment where facts are approached as aids to better practice, you acquire skills that will serve you throughout life.
These same skills apply when you move beyond what you learnt in school, sometimes into areas that did not exist when you were a child.
An examination based purely on rote learning gives huge advantages to candidates with very good memories, who can regurgitate what they memorised — sometimes without understanding a word — at endless length.
The result might be a good grade on the certificate, but little else.
This is one reason why many employers, especially of technical staff and people with high-level skills, have used certificates only to assemble shortlists, before setting their own practical tests to see if newcomers have what it takes to be trained for real work.
The new examination system provides a shortcut, in that the certificate begins to reflect what the candidate can do, rather than how good their memory is.
In many ways, the new syllabuses formalise and extend what the best teachers have been striving to practise for decades: that you learn more, and learn best, when you use what you have been taught, regardless of subject.
While there is now a strong emphasis on scientific and technical subjects and mathematics, this does not mean that older styles of learning must be neglected.
For example, the best way to learn a language is to speak it, and this is the only way to achieve a high level of proficiency.
Later in life, the more people you can communicate with, the more opportunities exist.
Dedicated and forward-thinking teachers were often blocked not only by restrictions on what they were supposed to teach, but also by lack of resources — a factor the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education is now rectifying, especially in rural schools.
Simply giving a school a guaranteed electricity supply (with solar panels often the most obvious and cheapest option), plus basic ICT equipment and affordable broadband internet, is an excellent start that is now being implemented rapidly.
There was a tendency in some circles — perhaps a result of poor educational practices and cultural norms inherited from the older British system, where “trade” was looked down upon — to see practical additions to education and an emphasis on doing and applying as second-rate.
In fact, they represent the upper end of education.
The real test of any education system and its curriculum is whether you are equipped to earn a living as you move through life, whether you start with useful skills, and — even more importantly — whether you know how to expand those skills and build up the solid combination of knowledge and practice that makes earning a living possible.
The Heritage curriculum, the extra skills teachers are acquiring, the conceptual changes, and the upgrading of school resources will make this easier, especially if teachers themselves continue to advance the reforms.
